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SPRINGFIELD, Ohio – August 26, 2004. The Ohio Supercomputer Center’s Springfield Ohio facility (OSC-Springfield) has signed an agreement with Raytheon’s Intelligence and Information Systems business to investigate new technologies using OSC’s high performance computing and storage systems and Ohio’s new Third Frontier Network (TFN).

OSC-Springfield Director Kevin Wohlever said a number of high performance and data-intensive computing technologies will be investigated using Raytheon’s systems. The agreement is effective for the remainder of 2004, with contracts renewable in both 2005 and 2006.

“Some data-intensive computing requires large amounts of data to be moved to and from central processing and storage environments,” said Wohlever. “The TFN provides a unique grid-ready testbed that is under the control of one organization for this type of testing.” Wohlever noted that the joint research has already begun.

The OSC-Springfield center is funded through a grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Supercomputer (ASC) program. OSC-Springfield is an extension of the Columbus-based OSC, founded in 1987 by the Ohio Board of Regents. OSC’s mission is to foster technology, education and computer networking among Ohio’s colleges, universities and research communities. The agreement is part of an effort to build a high-tech presence in the Springfield area.

OSC-Springfield Database Manager Jim Gregory said the Raytheon project requires data acquisition and storage of up to 160 Gigabits per second, 24 hours a day. He said the storage capacity required for this much data approaches 12 Petabytes per week, pushing the bandwidth and storage growth capabilities to the limit of software technology.

“One of OSC-Springfield’s missions is to investigate areas of data intensive computing. This kind of work fits right into this research area and also coalesces nicely with some other projects we're exploring for the state of Ohio,” said Gregory. “We will be exploring some of the newer file system technologies, including Object-Based File Systems and the new Zettabyte file system from Sun, to determine if they can meet these kinds of storage requirements.”